


Sleep tight and give your head to me

by FromMyLibrary



Series: The Genius Factory [4]
Category: X1 (Korea Band)
Genre: Angst, Broken Bones, Drugs, Enemies AND Lovers?, F/M, Fighting, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Love/Hate, M/M, Mental Instability, Narcotics, References to Addiction, References to Depression, Self-Destruction, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension, chungha and seungyoun are best friends, dont even ask me why I wrote this, dont read it if you want to be happy, except it's just hate but they hook up, for when you need to f e e l, i apologize for the angst, its addiction and its ugly, okay literally this is an expose on drugs kids, seungwoo and namjoo hook up, seungwoo and sejeong are buds, seungyoun and wooseok are roomates, some i.o.i and apink, this is the definition of codependency, this is the most unhealthy relationship ive ever written, yes its part of Genius
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-16
Updated: 2020-09-19
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:40:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 19,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26382040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FromMyLibrary/pseuds/FromMyLibrary
Summary: Excerpts from a story: Seungwoo and Seungyoun physically and verbally tearing each other apart followed by them hooking up and being self-destructively codependent ft. the most amount of tension ever. Also they’re in college: Seungwoo is a 4th year and Seungyoun is a 2nd year.Falling apart felt different than how Seungwoo imagined it. For one, he thought it would hurt. He thought it’d be loud, deafeningly loud, and that it would run him straight through like a lance plunged deep into the heart of his ribcage, jaggedly piercing bone and leaving the fragments to sit in his body until they festered his death upon their shards. But there wasn’t anything particularly violent about it, he found. It felt like heated kisses and wandering hands, it sounded like moaning exhales along the back of his ear, and it looked like Cho Seungyoun. Falling apart was lurid and beautiful and he desperately needed to keep doing it.(titles are from demob happy songs, sue me)none of this was published in order but i think it's right now????
Relationships: Cho Seungyeon | Seungyoun/Han Seungwoo
Series: The Genius Factory [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1638610
Comments: 2
Kudos: 20





	1. I just made you up to hurt myself

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I keep updating this - i listened to Hoppippolla's cover of Creep and then Nine Inch Nails came on and...

There were some people Seungyoun could just feel inside him – that he could just enter a room and feel a part of himself nagging at the presence of another - begging, clawing, itching to find the body, find the eyes, find the fucking essence bleeding all over the walls in a sheen of possession, where they almost obsessively marked every space he could ever walk into and then some. It wasn’t the hyper awareness of avoidance or the dull ache of reminders shoved before unblinking eyes held open to strobes and screams and whatnot. It was a deep curling addiction in the pit of his stomach, blurring his mind until he forgot even how to breath and all he could feel was a boy. It didn’t matter that it tasted rotten and it didn’t matter that it bit him right back, sinking teeth into him like a rapid dog at feeding time. It was the thrill of pushing something until it pushed back and there someone, he had come to find, that always, eventually pushed back. 

Seungyoun wasn’t usually the type of person to come down here, down to the old nuclear storage beneath the dining hall that, for better or for worse, was a bit notorious among the student body and intentionally shoved aside by the faculty. There was steam and a kettle and the school’s administration knew how important good ventilation was. It wasn’t a place for good people and yet some, people who would cling to that title by tooth and nail, found themselves mindlessly following drips of vibrant blood in the snow until they came open a ripped and rotting carcass and pretended to be surprised at what they found. But here no one was allowed to stumble inside and feign innocence for more than a few minutes. The longest someone ever held out was a day and they weren’t here anymore: not the bunker, but the island. Maybe it had taken him too long to find his own way to it, and maybe he wasn’t really meant to at all, but he was there. He was there alone and without hesitation. 

It happened, he had heard, that there was this weird otherworldly quality, a liminal limbo of escapism, that sat in the tunnel and gathered on the floor like flooding waters. They were right. It felt like wading through gushing streams of a rip current as Seungyoun approached the metal doors, industrial steel with a long bar slung across the front, hanging open and dangling in the cold air of the passage. The thumping beyond the doors was as enticing as the sharp point of a knife, just glinting and waiting and cinching for skin to be placed against it. Seungyoun had never been one for that sort of thing, but he knew the feeling. He understood it well. A hand, he couldn't say whose, led him in. Like a vortex of swirling light and sound it felt quite alike those old time travel animatics from an old 80s film, all done up beyond comprehension and nauseous to a fault. It might as well have been. Seungyoun would have thought himself slipped through the rifts of another’s memory had that hand, calloused and delicate, not guided him into it, further than he would have gone otherwise. 

He came here wound so tight that the wire was frayed and inching its way toward an inevitable heavy snap that would doubtlessly fling back and sting his sting like a whip. He came here looking for battles, fists wrapped and tongue loose with acidic words he only ever heard when speaking to himself. The intensely jarring smell of sweat hit his nose and mad Seungyoun cringe at the utterly debauched stink of it. It was dark and bathed in red: every goddamn shadow was coated in crimson merlot and candied lipstick, pressing kisses onto the contours of overexposed faces disappearing as they moved between the lights. It felt visually attacking to look at it, to look at them. It felt like the most nightmarish dream, all the things he wasn’t supposed to want. He wanted to be wanted. To have the manic delirium of feeling looked at, pried apart and studied, to be dissected for all the rot that was growing inside him unnoticed. He wanted to leave the hysteric evidence of his existence burned into the floor in scars of a circling mind racing around after his own heart in his chest, the two of them locked into a stumbling chase of reaching hands, never quite really reaching anything. 

The harried thumping of the dizzy lights, creeping around like neon snakes shot out of a ray gun, splashed onto the floor in a wash of confusing modernity that beset the privileged grace of the space in the gritty, spinning cyber fest of metallic whispers. Inside, the rush of the summer air and the blurred songs finally raced through into his head in streaks, it was a swirling gyre of colour and noise and disorienting breath as the streets respired. 

Beating, beating, beating heartbeats in rhythmic syncopation seduced to different patterns, thumping and grinding strings within their chests lured from the ribcage like a innocently pulled rope, lurid dragged further and further until the organ was squeezed through the bone and flopped listlessly down to the shuddering dancefloor. That’s what they looked like. That’s what they felt like: children of neon and wire and metal clinking lullabies, swung round like a babe in arms until they kept spinning, along and steaming, round and round until the ground came up to meet them. Frenzied, innocuous, acquitted and naïve: they poured out their lungs and their hearts, reveling in the dripping blood as it poured over their sweat soaked skin in a sheen of adulterated adolescence. These were the people who fell on their knees to pray to youth, to pray to forgetfulness, and to pray to astral dreams. 

Hot, so stifling hot. The earth shook so harshly against Seungyoun's feet that his spine joined in the reverberations to such an extent his head decided to leave, to feel so deeply that it just rocketed right out of his pounding skull. There were no words down here, it seemed blasphemous to try to put something so, unfeeling, unviscerally guttural, into such a purely raw place like that. And Seungyoun, he didn’t belong. His body did, his skin did and his muscles, but not his mind. Theirs were all writhing on the floor beneath their stomping, spinning feet, crawling toward the dark recesses in the corners and out of the neon rays that shot at them like snipers on rooftops, laser after laser after spraying bullet fire. 

Caked in the flames of a song that barely sounded like music and more like cybernetic sinew, two girls, bare backs doused in the river of rainbow lights and shadowed beyond recognition, led Seungyoun into the sea of infinite, connected bodies, the amoebae of limbs and love and breathless eyes glossed over with something called life. It was so aggressively gentle, the way their lingering hands pulled him into the beating mass of flesh, a coaxing sincerity of wanting him to follow and it too became a sacrilege to think. Waves of pumping fire blew into his blood until it boiled over in bubbles of heated itches that poured through the pores of his skin and clogged his lungs from reaching the air. But, it wasn’t half as terrifying as it was meant to be. No, not yet.

There, at the end of it all, or perhaps in the middle, dancing in the thick of it like all the sweat and the breaths and the tears were sacrifices to his altar, was Han Seungwoo. Seungyoun watched as the fourth year came undone, sins on his sleeve, revealing in the migraine inducing hysteria of an electric guitar and the frenetic pounding of some drums that drove Seungyoun mad. He watched the other’s body twist and thrash. He watched him grab people, encircling their waists and stealing him from their own minds, inviting them into his instead. But there was something so wonderful about it, like the unstoppable quiet which crashed over when a storm rolled in and violently shook everything inside it to no end, and everything simply just gave in and let itself be battered. 

The thing about Seungwoo was that he was an immaculate sinner, all wanton and brash and everything everyone expected someone like that to be. He melted into the air and spoke out compulsions as if they were simple hellos. He didn’t succumb to it, he fostered it. Seungwoo made his own violating faults as if he were his own debase god hungry for disenchanted yearning. Whatever was the opposite of love, that’s what he doled out. And it was a market. He wouldn’t still be here if no one took it. He was corruption for people too far passed forgiveness and letting them confess straight to the heart of hell. 

Seungyoun watched another boy slink around the side of Seungwoo’s body to his front and rake his hands down the fourth year’s chest, catching on the edge of his pants and pressing into the muscle there briefly as they leaned in, arching their front into his chest. Seungwoo’s eyes found Seungyoun’s from across the mess of bodies and thundering beats, through a million different people all running toward nothing with washed up minds and bruises from falling one to many times. The elder held Seungyoun’s gaze, latching him in like a spider and simply letting the faceless boy drape himself across his chest, mouth at the space between his jugular and his shirt. Seungyoun lost any semblance of what was around him the second the boy bent down his neck from Seungwoo’s clavicle and a glistening slick of saliva brandished Seungwoo’s skin in the wake of his lips, catching the red lights as they bounded around the room finding his heaving chest there in the middle of the space. 

Seungyoun was sure, he was more certain than anything else, that Seungwoo lived in his gut stabbing and pocking and prodding at the organs until all Seungyoun felt was a hazy wash of pain and all he his head could latch onto was the hand holding the knife: the beautiful, adulterous, vice of a hand. It was scary how much he liked it. How much he needed it. Is that what it felt like to be in love? To be gone so completely for one feeling that he’d do anything to chase it? Or maybe love wasn’t the right word. Maybe it was something very different. 

Seungwoo kept staring at him, mouth opening in an almost audible moan that tickled the back of Seungyoun’s ear. Seungwoo kept his eyes trained on the younger until his head tipped back and his eyes fluttered shut unfocused. But Seungyoun didn’t look away. No, this was meant for him to see. This was a game. Seungwoo drove insane jittering lover and cut their hearts out, pressing them into his palms and keeping them pumping by his hand alone: fingers squeezing, clinging, crushing around the organ as it sputtered life from its thumping mass. Seungyoun’s own bleed down the elder’s long fingers, dripping past his knuckles and circling down his forearm in gentle streams of yearning mistakes. He watched the thing falter and skip and bleed, but he didn’t do a damn thing but watch. He’d say the other ruined him if he hadn’t already done it himself. 

Seungwoo peeked an eye open and smiled when he caught Seungyoun unmoving, still staring at the boy latched to the elder’s neck, making love to the skin. Maybe Seungwoo was a saint too, because there was only one thing Seungyoun still felt that made him feel alive. If Seungwoo weren’t there to pour gasoline on his burning resentment he wasn’t sure if he’d feel anything at all. It was coping, it was living, it was fucking Han Seungwoo. He kept him barely alive, short of cutting slits in his wrists and hardwiring his brain on methamphetamines, Seungwoo kept him sewn together while he still languidly pulled at the seams. 

And Seungyoun imagined himself giving in to it, the compulsion. He imagined Seungwoo there, above him, telling him all the wrong he’s done as he unraveled the younger beneath him, as he picked apart his stitches with a ricin laced knife, weaving into sinew and tissues and plunging inside deep to the center of his stomach. He imagined Seungwoo reminded him of all the awful things we wears upon his shoulders as the elder held them down, pinned them down, beat them into submission. Seungyoun wanted Seungwoo to tell him all the wrong he will do because he didn’t believe he could ever stop and to suck the words right out of his mouth before he had a chance to defend himself. 

“Tell me what I’m supposed to think,” he had told the older boy later. “Tell me what I’m supposed to feel.” 

“Already so lost,” Seungwoo had whispered back, his hot breath tickling Seungyoun stomach. “You’re too young. How’d that happen?” 

“I got restless,” was all he said, huffing out the words in annoyance. 

“You lucky little son of a bitch,” Seungwoo laughed into the flesh of the younger’s stomach, hands smoothing out down on his hipbones in a splay of gentle fingers. “You chose it didn’t you?” 

“I wish I wasn’t so fucking special,” Seungyoun murmured. 

"Will I get in trouble for breaking such a special thing?” he taunted up at Seungyoun with a smirk that made Seungyoun want to pound his feet as far away from there as possible and to run himself quite literally over the cliff’s edge and into the sea. “I can make you feel very unspecial,” he said. “Is that what you want?” 

“I want you to shut up,” Seungyoun snapped at him. “I want you to make me feel as good as you felt earlier.” 

“Oh, you’re a jealous little thing, aren’t you?” 

Seungyoun reached toward the elder knelt before him and shoved Seungwoo’s head down as the fourth year laughed into his skin.


	2. Wicked Son of Jealousy

Han Seungwoo blew a string of smoke into the air and watched as it lazily twirled in the space before him, eventually dissipating at the nipping wind that rolled in on the back of the trees, ruffling their trunks and shaking amber golden leaves to the earth. He stood with his hair whipping around in a frenzy of tiny dancing wisps which tickled his skin and blinded his eyes. The campus was quiet from up here, solitary. Seungwoo waited on the edge of the space, watching the students flitting about and filtering into buildings. The fuzzy comfort of a slew of cigarettes delicately perched between his puckered lips, dry and cracked, languidly guided him from one minute to the next until he had been there, atop the dining hall with his tie discarded to the stone stop along with his blazer, waiting for thirty seven minutes. And what was he waiting for? 

Seungyoun slammed open the door to the roof, the poor thing almost jumping off its hinges as it rocketed, full force, into the brick wall beside it, smashing the handle in. 

“What the actual fuck?!” the boy threw out, long strides covering the spartan space with thundering footfalls until he was toe to toe with the other. 

Seungyoun was a beautiful kid, with gentle eyes and a million dollar smile; Seungwoo might even venture to say 12 mil. But this was how Seungwoo saw him and how he liked Seungyoun best: spitting acid in his face with a jaw so tight it might break. 

“Don’t people typically bow when seeking an audience with royalty?” he drawled, after a long drag of his cigarette. 

“You fucking liar,” Seungyoun grit out, poking the other in the chest with each word. “I knew you were low but I didn’t think you were this bad.” 

Seungwoo laughed, the giddily disturbed air wafting into Seungyoun’s face and making the younger cringe at the smoke on his breath. “Oh, this has to be good,” he chuckled, flinging the butt of the cigarette away with a flick. 

Seungyoun grit his jaw, eyes flickering with an unknown emotion for a split second before he arched his fist and slammed it into the other boy’s face with a resounding crack of bone, sending the boy’s cheek flying to the side with an awkward neck bend. Seungwoo stumbled back at the impact, cupping his face where blood gushed from his nose and through the spaces between his fingers, eventually dripping down onto his white dress shirt. The fourth year was still grinning when he lifted his head again, dropping his hands to let the blood dribble freely down onto his lip, staining his teeth as he grinned. 

“Oh, baby, were you hurt that much?” Seungwoo purred. “Why didn’t you tell me? I’d have made it worse.” 

Seungyoun almost growled, a feral anger rising up inside him. “You fucking bastard!” he screamed in the other’s face, gathering the fabric on Seungwoo’s chest into a vice beneath his hand and pulling the other forward. “You didn’t even have to,” he grit into the elder’s face he forced right before his, breathing in the other’s exhale. “What good did it do you?” he spat out. 

Seungwoo shrugged with a quirk of his eyebrow, the obnoxious air of an untouchable sinner who knew he need not ever bow to another. “It was fun,” he smirked back. 

Seungyoun pushed his arms out abruptly, sending the older boy flying back with a stumble. Seungwoo laughed as he straightened his spine and drew a hand across his mouth, smearing the blood from his nose across the skin in a sweeping streak up to his right cheekbone, the back of his hand now sullied with bright crimson. Seungwoo lunged forward and grabbed Seungyoun’s neck, the other faltering at the sudden clasp of fingers drawing his head down as Seungwoo brought a knee up directly into Seungyoun’s waiting stomach. The younger groaned and swayed to the side as Seungwoo released him, taking a hand to place it on the left side of Seungyoun’s face and shoving him sideway. 

“Fuck you, Han!” Seungyoun screamed at him, hand going out to the railing to steady himself. “Fuck you and your FUCKING LIES!” 

They stared at each other with ragged breathes for a moment before they were both propelling together again and colliding in a flurry of punches and jabbing elbows. Seungwoo clipped the other’s head with a right hook to the temple. Seungyoun punched into his side twice with elongated knuckles. They grabbed and shoved and animalistically tore into each other, the heel of Seungyoun’s palm connecting and shoving Seungwoo’s broken nose bone back into his face. Seungwoo grabbed his forearm and twisted as far as he could to the left, nearly snapping the boy’s wrist before he wrenched it away. 

“You’re slipping, Youn,” Seungwoo taunted, bouncing back and forth between his feet in a little hop, arms raised before him, elbows tucked and fists blocking his face.

Lucky for Seungyoun, Seungwoo used to be a boxer, competitive and privileged. And lucky for Seungwoo, well, Seungyoun was goddamn livid. The second year ran forward with his head tucked and rammed his shoulder into Seungwoo’s stomach, his arm wrapping around the waist before him and the other boy reaching down to shove Seungyoun’s head away as they tumbled back onto the roof, Seungwoo’s head slamming cleanly onto the stone and Seungyoun’s forehead made contact with the other boy’s hip bone. Seungwoo pushed the other to the side, rolling Seungyoun’s body off of him. They both promptly scrambled onto their unsteady feet, Seungwoo locking Seungyoun into a headlock from behind, his forearm tucked under the younger’s chin and holding him in place. 

“Why?!” Seungyoun tried to yell at him, gasping and clawing at the skin around his throat. “Why do you have to fuck with me?!” 

“I didn’t do shit,” Seungwoo growled into his ear, tightening his arm. 

Seungyoun could feel the other’s chest thumping through his back. The beats sauntered in along his spine and choked his breath as the other held him there. 

“You’re a liar,” Seungyoun managed to gasp out. 

“Am I?” Seungwoo laughed. “Or are you making things up again, honey?” he teased, releasing the boy and stepping back to see the murderous look in the second year’s eyes. 

“Bullshit!” Seungyoun screamed his voice raw. “Bullshit you didn’t lie to every fucking kid on this campus about-”

“About what?” Seungwoo challenged. 

Seungyoun screamed again and grabbed Seungwoo’s shirt, pushing and pushing and pushing until Seungwoo’s back hit the rail on the edge of the roof and he started tipping back. On tippy toes, dusting against the ground, and hands scrambling to grasp for purchase on the rail, Seungyoun effectively held him over a drop the entire height of the dinning hall. They paused, Seungyoun’s hesitant fury, unbridled and wild, fortifying his arms before him: the only thing keeping Seungwoo from slipping over the lip of the rail. 

“You could do it.” Seungwoo hissed. “Drop me.” 

There was a look in Seungwoo’s eyes of wicked amusement and it scared him. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Seungyoun murmured. 

“Do it,” Seungwoo said again, lips curving around the command in a smile and his tongue lapping at it as it left this mouth.

Seungyoun reeled at the words, his fists loosening causing the elder to fall back an inch before Seungyoun tightening them again and clutched the body with a renewed vigor. The hammering heartbeat he had felt earlier as Seungwoo crushed his windpipe pumping beneath his fist now. 

“Drop me, Youn,” Seungwoo repeated, letting his arms fall open at his sides and swing in the open air he hung over. “Do everyone a favor.” 

“Trust me,” Seungyoun answered. “I want to.” 

They locked gazes again, a charged tension like a live wire flinging between them. Seungyoun then pulled the body in front of him forward, haplessly letting the momentum tumble them both to the ground, collapsing on the roof with the fourth year’s body flush atop his. Seungwoo arms shot out and bracketed the younger’s head, holding his weight just a hair’s length above the other’s rapidly beating chest. Seungwoo dropped down onto his elbows after a second, catching his breath, eyes still wide and excited from his trip over the edge. Seungyoun let him. 

“You’re a fucking coward,” Seungwoo leaned down and whispered into Seungyoun’s ear with a smile so viciously dripping in iniquity it begged to be absolved. “You’re just scared, Youn. You’re so fucking scared,” the soft words came out in puffs that shivered down the younger’s spine. 

“I hate you,” Seungyoun breathed back, licking his lips. 

Seungwoo recognized the vulnerable stare and dropped his body down the rest of the way, leg falling flat on the rooftop between Seungyoun’s thighs and another melding to the younger’s hip. He reached forward to roughly fist the other’s hair as smashed their lips together in a desperate kiss, teeth clacking as they slammed together. Something burned and pooled inside his chest with a seething, vitriolic disgust but he didn’t stop. Seungyoun’s hands found themselves drifting upwards from the stone and seizing bunches of fabric at the sides of Seungwoo’s waist, smoothing out and dripping down to the curve of his spine as they continued. There were bites and breathes and licks driven mad with a passion of loathing that fueled a revolting, repulsive competition. Seungwoo pressed down upon him, a domineering force bearing him into the ground: a stifling, imprisoning weight which he couldn’t have run from even if he want to - not that he wanted to. 

The worst part was… it wasn’t the first time.


	3. You fall in deep when I lie to you

“God, property law is so boring!” Minjae groaned. “I don’t even know why you care about it so much!” 

“Yeah,” Hwarang laughed. “International property law is boring” he parroted Minjae’s words in an overexaggerated manner. “You just don’t get customary law, dude.” 

Minjae opened his mouth to respond and found he had no argument to give the other and struggled with a retort. Hwarang, of course, noticed his friend’s internal struggled and did what Seungwoo had spent the better part of 15 minutes attempting not to do, and burst out laughing. Minjae looked so betrayed as he sat there with Hwarang openly making fun of him and Seungwoo almost choking himself on suppressed bubbles of laughter rising in his chest. 

Hwarang cut off in the middle of his laugh and his eyes focused on something behind Seungwoo, a confused worry seeping into them. Seungwoo grabbed the back of the chair and twisted his body to find a fuming Seungyoun standing there, arms crossed and deep set scowl on his face. 

“Why are you here?” he asked. 

“Because fuck you that’s why!” Seungyoun yelled back. 

“Well, okay then,” Seungwoo drawled, turning back to face his friends but Seungyoun was there, grabbing his shoulder and forcibly twisting the other to face him again. 

“Dude, what do you want?” 

“Chill it, Han,” Seungyoun spat. 

“How did you even know I’d be here?” Seungwoo questioned. “This isn’t even my class.” 

“We need to talk,” Seungyoun shot at him, not even bothering to look at the other two boys at the table who glanced between themselves. 

Seungwoo reached a hand up to scratch his nose and then dropped it on the desk, folding an elbow up so he could prop his chin on his palm and tilt his chin up toward the younger. “What if I don’t want to?” 

“Well,” Seungyoun huffed. “I want to.” 

Seungwoo’s fingers lifted from his cheek and began to drum on the bone there in thought. “Honestly, why would I listen to you?” he drawled. “What would I get out of it?” 

“Me not shanking you in your sleep,” Seungyoun shot back through gritted teeth, a frantic energy boiling in him causing his foot to tap against the lecture hall floor. 

“If you wanted to sleep with me, you could have just said something, honey,” Seungwoo smirked at him. 

Hwarang sputtered out a laugh at his friend’s remark. 

Seungyoun’s eyes found him immediately. “What’s so funny?”

Hwarang bit his lip to stop the chuckles and popped his tongue into the inside of his cheek with a click. “I’d pay to see you two alone in a room together for twenty minutes,” he joked, Minjae’s forehead on his shoulder as the other incapacitated himself with body wreaking laughs. 

“Twenty?!” Seungwoo blurted. “I’d kill him in ten, man!” 

Seungyoun’s arm shot out and grabbed Seungwoo’s shoulder, pushing the boy back with a strong heave causing the elder to fumble out of his chair and stand. 

“What the fuck?” Seungwoo demanded, throwing his arms out in annoyance. 

Minjae made a move to stand but Seungwoo put out a hand to stop him and the econ student was sliding back into his seat beside Hwarang. “It’s fine,” he told them. 

Seungyoun grabbed Seungwoo’s wrist and dragged him out of the lecture hall and into the hallway, devoid of students as they all still sat listening to their professors drone on. How Seungyoun even knew Seungwoo was chilling with his friends after their dissertation let out early in one of the economics department’s many classrooms, Seungwoo didn’t know. The younger held him tightly as he walked over to another door and peered into the dark classroom through the small window implanted in it. 

“Someone seems feisty today,” Seungwoo murmured to him. 

Seungyoun flinched at the other’s voice. “I really need you to stop talking right now.”

Seungwoo leaned against the wall, arm still property of the other boy. “And that’s because-” he started to ask before Seungyoun pulled him into an empty classroom and let the door slowly drift closed. 

“This seems fun,” Seungwoo continued, as Seungyoun dropped his wrist. “What are gonna do? Murder me?” 

“That was a hell of a stunt you pulled today!” Seungyoun threw out.

“What did I do?” Seungwoo balked melodramatically. 

Seungyoun kept glaring at him in a furious anger that Seungwoo decided, for preservation purposes, he probably shouldn’t poke until it burst.

“Okay fine,” the fourth year gave in. “Yeah, it was a bit much.” 

“I swear you’re trying to ruin my life.” 

Seungwoo butt hit the window sill and he relaxed into a lean against it, crossing his arms and quirking an eyebrow. “Glad you finally noticed.” 

“You don’t ever take anything seriously!” Seungyoun exploded, shaking his hands in the air with talon like fingers that simply cringed with exasperation. “And now I’m mad!” Seungyoun almost yelled, battling to keep his voice down. 

“Good for you. Why does that concern me?” 

Seungyoun paced back and forth between Seungwoo and the door. The windows at the side of the room let in a warm afternoon light that fell on the wooden floorboards in patterns of tree shadows and swayed slightly in the ocean breeze outside. Seungwoo watched as the other’s dress shoes walked back and forth across the space. 

“And then I started thinking about how much I just hate you,” Seungyoun rambled. 

“Did you come here to yell at me?” Seungwoo sighed, lifting from the ledge and stepping into the other’s space. “If so, can I leave?” he gestured over Seungyoun’s shoulder at the door. 

“No, I came here-” Seungyoun groaned and pulled at his hair, nearly ripping it from his scalp. “Ugh! I don’t know what I came here to do!”

“Then leave??” Seungwoo offered, a lilting bafflement to his voice, clearly not following the other’s logic or lack thereof. 

“No!” Seungyoun immediately yelled back. 

But he made a mistake. He let his gaze dropping to the elder’s lips for just a second, Seungwoo noticing and a grin erupting on his face. 

“Why not?” Seungwoo coaxed. 

“Because I hate you and I just need to-” he groaned again and then surged forward, grabbing at Seungwoo and kissing the breath from his chest like a starved man. 

Seungwoo snuck his hand up the back of Seungyoun’s untucked shirt, the fabric rustling as it snaked onto the other’s bare back. The younger shivered at the contact and then stopping rigid as his eyes locked onto the door. Seungyoun shoved him away and anxiously peered at the small rectangle of glass looking out into the hallway. 

“The window,” he muttered. 

“Class doesn’t get out for twenty minutes,” Seungwoo reminded him, pulling the other in again. “I don’t even think we need that long.”

“I didn’t-” Seungyoun started to say before the fourth year grabbed his chin and forced the boys eyes to meet his.

“We both know what you came to me for,” Seungwoo told him. “And I won’t ever ask what drove you my way but I know why you came.”

He knew too. He did. Seungyoun knew exactly when that ugly feeling rose in his stomach, the where he felt so disgustingly special and bored and masochistically resentful of his fucking life, that all he needed to stop it, to shove it back down into the shadows, was something sloppy and frisky and repulsive and Seungwoo was the one who could give it to him. Maybe it wouldn’t work if there anything but disdain there, anything but the constant reminder from the older boy that he could, would, and had always been there to knock Seungyoun down a few pegs whenever he asked. And he just kept fucking asking for it. 

“I come to you when I need the devil’s whisper,” he told Seungwoo as the elder held him down flat on the teacher’s desk with a heavy hand on his chest, pushing the second year’s ribcage almost concave. “And you always deliver.” 


	4. I'm Keeping You Alive

Seungyoun took in a slightly labored breathe after having ran from his last class in the economics department across campus to the resident’s block. He ignored the calls of greeting from friends and acquaintances and strangers he passed, smiles on their faces as they watched the usually magnanimous boy zip passed them, flying through the winding paths. His hair was a mess, shaggy fluff swept around his head messily from his run and there were fraught tears forming in his eyes, at what he didn’t know. When such violent emotions came crashing in and he always knew where to go to forget them, to tie them up in a dark closet and set the thing ablaze. A teeming breathlessness of frantic rebellion shone through his masked attempt to suppress it. He knew what he must look like: reckless distress on the face of a boy looking for absolution with the eyes of an addict itching for a fix. But, who’s to say sinners couldn’t grant him mercy too? 

He ran smack into someone on his way, clipping their shoulder and then stopping immediately to see if they were alright. The frenzied beating in his chest lurched at the sudden change of pace, his one track mind, long since taken over by impulse, faltering at the abrupt pause. He attempted to calm himself as he went to check on the poor student who had dropped their books in surprise when his shoulder met theirs. 

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry,” he had bent down to retrieve them, only realizing it was Namjoo after he looked up from his crouch. “Oh, Namjoo. I wasn’t looking. Are you okay. I-”

“It’s fine,” she said softly, all the making of a smile on her face except her eyes… they shone with something akin to tender pain. 

He stood slowly, rising from the ground and awkwardly handing her the hardcovers. “I didn’t mean to. Are you sure you’re okay?” 

“Yeah. Yeah I’m fine, Seungyoun,” she answered. “I promise.”

“I get so distracted sometimes,” he continued. “Can I make it up to you?” 

“No. It’s okay,” she insisted, hugging the books to her chest. “Really. You go,” she nodded her head the direction he had been running. “It looked pretty important.” 

“I-”

“Bye,” she murmured and walked off with a small wave. 

Seungyoun’s legs started pumping again, propelling him through the door to Jericho, thundering up the staircase to find his little respite between insider trading and digital bond manufacturing. He reached for the door, knowing it would be unlocked, and let himself inside. He started to take off his coat as soon as his feet passed the threshold, slamming the door closed behind him with a kick of his heel. Seungwoo stood there waiting - professional, impassive- as the other peeled off the thick fabric, pausing once one arm was freed and turning to him with a thoughtful look. 

“I need to ask you a favor,” Seungyoun said, continuing to more slowly and deliberately peel the coat from his arms and drop it on the other’s desk. “Don’t asphyxiate me in my sleep.” 

Seungwoo laughed and stalked forward to grab the bottom of the younger’s dark blue jumper in his hands, thumb running over the wool for a beat and his knuckles brushing up against the other’s stomach. 

Seungyoun grabbed his wrist tightly, halting him. “I’m serious,” he said. 

“If you’re so worried about me, then leave,” Seungwoo threw back in challenge, already moving back step by step as he spoke and dropping the fabric from his hands. 

Seungwoo put his empty palms in the air in a gesture that came off like a man not invested and willing to walk away which they both knew to be a lie. Seungyoun wasn’t that man either. He wasn’t too proud to realize he needed it and he most certainly knew he couldn’t walk away. Not now. 

“Guess I’ll die then,” he said and shucked the sweater over his head. 

They tumbled into the wall first, melding into one another with hot breaths, Seungwoo caging the younger there between his forearms. Seungyoun turned his face to the side as Seungwoo dropped his lips to the other’s neck, sucking and nipping hungrily. Seungyoun’s chest was getting more and more constricted, choppy exhales interlaced with drawn out noises he didn’t know he could make. Seungwoo bit a little too harshly into his neck and Seungyoun’s neck snapped back around, hands going up to the elder from his body. Seungwoo took a step back to rebalance himself and immediately came right back, slamming Seungyoun into the wall again, the younger’s head hitting the flat surface and wincing. 

“Ow! You fucker!” he yelled. 

Seungwoo smirked and pressed closer. Seungyoun let him connect their lips again before he bit down onto Seungwoo’s lip, tasting blood as the elder groaned and yanked himself away. Seungyoun smiled to himself as he stepped up to Seungwoo and threw him on the other’s bed. Seungwoo bounced on the mattress as he landed, a hallow thud resonating before his body was held down, a hand on each arm and Seungyoun’s weight pinning his hips. The younger straddled him and leaned down to press a chaste kiss to Seungwoo’s lips, the crimson from his lip rubbing off and staining Seungyoun’s swollen lips. 

They stilled, catching their breath and quieting the thunder in their chest and clouded their heads. Seungyoun took his time languidly drawing the sharp point of his nail along the other’s jugular, tracing his trachea down from his chine to his collarbone where it rested flat and open before him. He pressed further into the space at the boy’s Adam’s apple before flicking his nail away, a rough scrape of Seungwoo’s skin beneath the gesture. As Seungyoun’s hand slowly fell away, Seungwoo grabbed it and placed it back on his throat, prying the younger’s index finger away and resting the nail like the barrel of a gun against his own throat. Seungyoun kept a straight face and brought his hand up to grip Seungwoo’s chin, nails digging into the bone of the elder’s jaw in tiny assertive crescents. Seungwoo had the audacity to smile beneath his grip, flexing his jaw as he played with his tongue, swiping along his lower lip and then tucking it into his teeth in a smug grin. Seungyoun readjusted his hand and jerked the fourth year’s head to the side, leaning down to place his lips at the other’s ear. 

“I wish someone cut the tongue from your mouth years ago,” he purred into Seungwoo’s ear. “But then I couldn’t do it myself.” 

“Coming from the boy who whines my name like a prayer when he’s under me,” Seungwoo mocked. “I’m terrified,” added on the end in a breathy taunt. 

Seungyoun’s eyes turned murderous and he reached toward the other’s neck again, only to finally find the resistance he craved. 

“Oh no, this is not how this works,” Seungwoo shot at him, grabbing his arms back and flipping them so Seungyoun was underneath him, all innocent eyes and blood stained kiss. 

“Is it a power trip?” the second year teased him. “Knowing this is the one time someone can’t run away from your fucking-”

Seungwoo reared his hand back and slapped him across the face. They both quieted at the smack, Seungyoun’s face ablaze at the sting and Seungwoo’s ragged breath the only sound which crawled into the echo of his palm greeting the younger’s cheek. 

“You slapped me,” Seungyoun murmured. 

“You deserved it.” 

“You slapped me!” the younger’s voice rose and his face contorted into an angry betrayal. “You fucking-”

Seungwoo interrupted him by shoving his tongue down the other’s throat, sucking the breath out and stuffing the words back down. “You’re not going to do a damn thing about it,” he taunted, pulling Seungyoun’s lip with his teeth as he drew back to rest his forehead against the second year’s chest. “Not a damn thing, Youn. And you know it.” 

Seungyoun released a tense huff from his lungs and carded his hands into Seungwoo’s hair, roughly pulling it when they reached the top and forcing the elder’s head into the air to meet his gaze. “You’re right.” 

There were moments in Seungyoun’s life where he blacked out, occasionally from drinking him into oblivion and other times the impending weight of his conscious simply drifting away for a small break when the moment allowed. But never in his life did he think his mind would wipe blank and leave his body, alone and vulnerable, in the unforgiving arms of the only person he ever truly hated. They wrapped around him like a cobra squeezing the life out of him and yet each breath he took in was something that burned deep inside him in a wild untamed way. And there was rushing guilt, there always was, waiting to be released from a damn and wash over his naked spine in a haze of freezing realization. 

There was never anything beautiful about them, about how they came together or how they left. It was an awful, ugly, terrible thing when Seungyoun gave in to whatever fucked up compulsion led him into Seungwoo’s embrace, with the doubts and the shame and the viciously festering vice of facing your own faults over and over again as they were spoken back to you as you revealed in sinful extasy trying to forget them. Seungwoo always whispered them into his ear when he held him… when he took him apart. He always reminded Seungyoun of the parts inside him that deserved to be damned so deep they’d forget sunlight as he kissed him, as he caressed him, as he beat him back to where he belonged, hammering down until he couldn’t fight back – not that Seungyoun had ever wanted to. In a horrid and disgusting way, he thought he deserved it. Of course he didn’t see Seungwoo as his executioner but a part of him did die whenever his back hit the crumpled sheets which never fully lost the scent of him. He came too often now-a-days. 

“I need less self-destructive tendencies,” Seungwoo drawled sometime later, their time eaten up and spat back out again. 

He stood, stuffing his dress shirt into the band of his pants, managing to tame the billowing oxford. He grabbed his belt from the floor and secured it around his waist with a buckling sound that seemed all too metallic for the soft moment which sat around them in a foggy haze of sheet and skin and gasping moans. 

“You have me,” Seungyoun teased from the bed, bare legs twiddling beneath the stark white fabric in a soft rustle. 

Seungwoo looked up from his buckle and laughed, full and deep in his chest. “That’s what I’m talking about.” 

“Am I at least better than oxy?” Seungyoun asked with a lazy smile, maybe meaning it maybe not; he didn’t know himself. 

“No,” Seungwoo answered, staring the younger boy down. “You’re worse than all that.”

Seungyoun rolled onto his stomach, perpendicular on the mattress, and propped himself up on his elbows, letting his head loll to the side where it rested atop his fist. “Why?” he asked.  
Seungwoo’s gaze met his and it was disarmingly void of amusement or anger or passion or smug victory. It was just his eyes staring right back at Seungyoun and the younger felt more exposed than he had mere minutes ago, unraveled beneath the fourth year’s hands. 

“You’d be one hell of a withdrawal, Youn and you know it,” Seungwoo’s voice drifted over. 

Seungyoun laid back down on the bed with a satisfied huff, sprawling his arms up by his head, over the edge of the bed, and dangling them there. The stretch drew a sore shock up his back and melted into it with a long exhale. 

“You know this is bad,” He said after a moment as Seungwoo was shrugging on his blazer. 

“Sure.”

He looked over to watch Seungwoo fix his collar with deft hands working around the back of his neck. “I don’t really care though,” Seungyoun continued. 

Seungwoo laughed, a tiny but genuine chuckle. “You don’t care about anything. Not really. That’s why everyone loves you.”

Seungyoun hummed in response. 

“And you’d rather wallow than face a real emotion, wouldn’t you?” Seungwoo said, not a question but more of a statement, more of a diagnosis. 

“I came here didn’t I?” Seungyoun answered. 

Seungwoo soundlessly reached for the doorknob and then paused. Seungyoun clocked the slight tense of muscle in the elder’s shoulders which made it appear as if he was thinking, mulling over the rights words to say in response before they fell again and the door was creaking open into the hallway. 

“You better be gone by the time Minjae gets back,” he threw out in a terse remark over his shoulder without looking back. 

Seungyoun curled into the mangled comforter which had been kicked to the foot of the bed and drew it up over his naked body, soothing the aches and the searing touches still littering his skin. He wrapped himself up like a suture, and laid there in the silence.

“I came here,” he muttered to himself. 

It was uncomfortable to face the reality his own decisions had made. It was exactly the opposite of the reason he arrived at Seungwoo’s bed time and time again. But a part of him also knew that wasn’t true: that he was reminded of exactly why he hated himself each time he did. And the hardest question of all that he had never been able to answer was why the hell he kept crawling back.


	5. Have a little fun before they put us in the ground

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> this title is Barns Courtney :)))

Seungyoun was what you would call a good kid. He had found his way to Genius on a scholarship at the request and admiration garnered from a project he had started his second to last year of high school: a firewall trip that allowed him to short stack the up and coming bit coin black trade market on the dark web. He made billions. And even after all that, Seungyoun wasn’t a bad kid. No one at the Factory would ever dare accuse of Seungyoun of being on their level of moral and legal apathy. In fact, everyone loved him despite the empathetic tendencies he displayed, worried that someday the school might break him like it had all the others who couldn’t cut it, just waiting for him to join a graveyard of the sub-par. But he was still there, three years later and he still at Genius, excelling in the cyber department and taking part, more often than not, in the economics extracurricular ventures. 

Remarkably, there was one thing Seungyoun hated. Rather, one person, who he wished would tumble beneath the rungs of the island’s fence and be lost to the cavernous abyss of sea passed the cliffs never to surface again. One person that, when placed in the same room, would send his blood boiling so hot all the others would duck and cover for fear of becoming collateral damage. It wasn’t one of those classic rivalries either, or even a competitive streak in their academics which had spilled over into their personal lives somehow. No, it was a pure and vitriolic hate. It was abhorrence. It was Han Seungwoo. And you could ask him why. Many had. But that didn’t mean he would answer. In fact, he had never answered anyone. 

When Chungha told him she was dating the antichrist’s best friend, Jo Minjae, he didn’t question it. Minjae was a considerably soft kid with a wide reaching networks of allies to vouch for both his competence and his loyalty. And Chungha did deserve someone like that. When Sejeong said she actually quite liked the untouchable playboy of Genius, he didn’t judge her. He knew there were odd relationships formed in the types of places and events they frequented which required someone’s watchful eye to help guide them safely through debase nights and days and even more nights hell bent on liquor and whatever else drifted their way. Sejeong was an entertainer; she was allowed her vices. When Joy and Hayoung insisted that Seungyoun was a little too preoccupied, to use their word obsessed, with his own self-appointed enemy, he didn’t correct them. There was no one more observant than Joy and no one less worth arguing with than Hayoung. 

But when Seungwoo showed up, all crooked snarl and shining glassy eyes no doubt fogged by something less than savory, fisting his shirt with a sneer and asking Seungyoun why the hell Minjae was balling his eyes out and if he was responsible, Seungyoun finally fought back. 

“I didn’t do shit!” he spat in the elder’s face, shoving the boy’s broad chest away. 

A couple kids passed through the gothic ribbed vault tunnel next to them and looked over at the noise but quietly filtered off when they realize who exactly it was. Seungyoun stood from the sloped step of a pointed arch which led to the courtyard, ornate rosette carvings at the top where the bare branches of a low hanging tree poked through. 

“Bullshit, Youn!” Seungwoo flung back at him. “You did it because you can’t even leave my friends alone. What kind of sick twisted way to get back at me fucks with my friends?” 

“I didn’t tell her to do anything!”

Seungwoo scoffed and stalked forward into the second year’s space, Seungyoun’s back making contact with a thin column which dissected the open air arch. “I don’t believe you,” his voice dropped down and his face scowled. 

“It’s not like I ever expect you to?” Seungyoun faltered. “Why would I care what you think?” 

Seungwoo pressed forward until Seungyoun was flat against the stone. The door at the end of the tunnel squeaked open before Seungwoo’s head snapped toward the sound and Seungyoun, gaze locked onto the profile of the boy before him, heard the door brushed closed again followed by a hollow silence. 

“You don’t trust anyone,” Seungwoo grit out. “That’s your problem. You’re so fucked up you can’t even bear to think about anyone else.” 

Seungyoun hated it. He hated the words and he hated that he didn’t want to respond to them. He didn’t want to face them at all, let alone half-heartedly defend himself knowing they both were already convinced otherwise. 

The fourth year leaned in and trailed a finger down the curve of Seungyoun’s jaw. “But I already know all your secrets, fucker,” Seungwoo whispered. “I’m the one person you can’t hide from.”   
Seungyoun trembled at the words, heavy breath smoking out of his mouth. “Stop it!” he screamed, pushing Seungwoo back. “Fucking shut up and get out of my head!” he groaned, clutching at his face. 

“Why would I?” the other came right back, slamming Seungyoun into the stone with a harsh shove. 

Seungyoun’s hand wound up the back of Seungwoo’s head and his hand clawed into the other’s hair, gripping it tight and yanking the boy into his face. “This is why no one will ever love you,” the second year accused. 

Seungwoo laughed, dropping his hand from Seungyoun’s face and casually sliding it into his pant pocket. 

“Because you take and you take,” Seungyoun continued, “expecting me to give you all of my attention. You fucking have it already!” he practically vomited the words. “You have all my thoughts! All my anger and my hate and my broken excuses for distraction! Isn’t that enough?!” 

Seungwoo listened to the younger’s ragged breathing for a moment, a smile slowly rising on his face. “I never asked you for anything,” he taunted. “You did that all on your own, baby.” 

“I fucking hate you,” Seungyoun growled. 

“Oh, I love it when you damn me,” the elder breathed out, his fingers moving down to hook into Seungyoun’s belt loop at his hips and draw him in closer. 

“You should take my curses as a blessing I still speak to you,” Seungyoun challenged. 

“You think you can leave me?” Seungwoo mocked, hands tightening on the younger’s hips. “You’re addicted too.” 

Seungyoun forced his head to the side, to stare blindly down the darkened tunnel with its cut patterns of light sprawling on the stone floor in an eerie calmness. He tried to not feel, not to intensively place himself there under the gaze and the hands of the other boy. He felt them too much. They burned. 

“I don’t need you,” he tried to convince himself, still not meeting Seungwoo’s eyes. 

“There’s a liar in your head,” the elder shot into his ear. 

Seungyoun’s heartbeat picked up, it thundered out of his body and clawed its way up into his throat, stomping over his lungs on its way up to clog his windpipe and pricking at his mind. 

“Tell me,” Seungwoo coaxed, softer, quieter. “Tell me how much you need me.” 

Seungyoun turned back and stared straight into his eyes with a teeming anger that could have conquered Rome. “You feed my repulsion and I’m starving for it.”


	6. Heroine is so passe, honey

After everyone had left, after they had all given up for the time being and Seungyoun was left to search alone, he was deafening by his heartbeat in his ears, ramming itself into the very most battered parts of his skull. He sat on his bed, Ilyas gone somewhere when Seungyoun had not responded to the other’s words and let them pile up unmeet for hours. The second the door had closed behind his roommate the pile fell over, spilling stacks of words upon him in a crushing weight. He didn’t want them. He didn’t want the pity crawling all over him like centipedes and roaches and flies. He was in that state, the one where he felt the air on his face and the sheets beneath his hands and the gravity that sank down on his head. He felt everything, he felt it so fucking much. The next thing he knew there was a face at his door he thought he hallucinated until it came crashing in like blinding lightening or the jittery obsession of a prolonged fix. 

“What the fuck are you doing here?!” he yelled in the other’s face, pushing the hands away, tripping over his feet as he scrambled away from the apparition of guilt and shame, like a nightmare manifest. “This is REALLY not the fucking time to come here!” 

Seungwoo just stood there, emotionless, as he watched the other crumbling. “I thought you’d need me,” he said.

“What the fuck?” Seungyoun’s lip quivered, and his chest heaved. “I didn’t ask you to come! I didn’t! I wouldn’t! I-” he pulled in a large breath that barely fit down his windpipe and shuddered at the feeling. “My friend is fucking missing and you come crawling to me because your supplier ran out and you don’t want to start feeling again??” he spat out, meeting Seungwoo’s eyes with unbridled fury and contempt. 

The other boy hadn’t moved. He just fucking stood there and it angered Seungyoun to the nth degree that he was broken as well. He needed to watch the fourth year hurt as much as he did and he need, in that moment, so desperately needed to be the one that broke him. 

“I have other things to worry about than being the replacement you turn to that saves your life,” he told Seungwoo and felt the weight of the words as he said them. “Why don’t you go mess up your life somewhere else? I’m tired of watching you do it.”

They were awful words but he felt so smug the second Seungwoo’s jaw flexed, the second he would watch them sink into like bullets and almost imagine a red spot to start slowly spread across the fabric of his shirt. 

“Don’t think no one fucking knows what you’re all doing!” Seungwoo shot back. “Running around with your little fucking secrets and the little fucking game you’re playing with people’s lives for your own entertainment.” 

“How are you any better!?” Seungyoun screamed, his voice cracking and his eyes searing holes into the other boy’s head. 

Seungwoo laughed: a hollow, hopeless, painful laugh that rolled down Seungyoun’s tongue like vinegar. “I’ve always been better because you choose to fall apart.” 

Seungyoun swallowed the thick acrid taste in his mouth as the fourth year paused with the most deeply insulted look on his face. 

“Do you think I wanted this? Do you think I wanted to fail?” 

“It’s not my fault you turned to Oxy and Heroine and any fucking thing you can get your hands on instead of facing our own fucking mistakes!” Seungyoun argued, disgusted by the semblance he had any responsibility in the matter when all he did was blame the other for every vice he had come to use himself. “You’re just a shitty person who can’t live with themselves so they have drag everyone else down too!” 

“Are you fucking kidding me?!” Seungwoo balked. “Did you just fucking say that?!” 

Before Seungyoun could blink, the Seungwoo was there, knuckles slamming into the younger boy’s cheek with a crack, bone against bone. The shock alone was enough to distract him the imminent threat of the pissed off boy in front of him. Seungwoo grabbed the younger’s neck while he was still blinking the pain away, holding him slightly aloft and feeling Seungyoun’s body writhe as his feet faltered and stumbled for purchase on the floor. They simply sat chained in that moment, staring and breathing. A constellation of white dots speckled into Seungyoun’s eyes.  
The second year’s soft breath tickled the top of Seungwoo’s arm where it rested under the other’s nose in the space between them, flexing from elbow to wrist as he squeezed. 

“I turn to you, you fucking asshole,” he grit out, releasing his hand and dropping the other back down to the ground. 

“I don’t have to be here when you call.” 

“You’re right! You don’t!” he mocked. “I have other people on speed dial.” 

He didn’t know why, he really didn’t understand why, but it hurt. Seungyoun faced the emotion like the sole soldier in the trenches without a gas mask as mustard gas rained down upon them, frantic eyes finding soulless ones staring back until he saw not much of anything anymore. It felt like the hand of his mother as she was washing his hair in the large clubfoot tub of his childhood home had reached down to hold his head under the water. It was the ground falling away from his feet and not the other way around. 

“Do you think you’re my only fix?” Seungwoo drilled the thought into the younger’s head, and he was but Seungwoo didn’t need to give him the satisfaction of admitting it. “Everybody’s got their toys.” 

Seungwoo needed the power. He needed to be the one in control, even when his mind was clouded by the second year even more than the dragging pleasures of his highs. Seungyoun hurt more than the bottles and the baggies and tablets and the needles. He hurt more than dying because it didn’t stop. It never stopped. 

“You know you need me,” Seungwoo whispered into his ear. The words licked at the younger’s skin and seeped into his brain like a snake injected into his nervous system and he felt the nip of wet teeth on his cartilage. “You know you do.” 

“ _You_ came to _me_!” Seungyoun raggedly breathed out, barely upright between the elder’s arms, clinging to a sanity without Seungwoo in it and yet dependent on him to not crumple to the ground in ruin. “ _You_ came here!” 

“And you answered the fucking door, Youn,” Seungwoo reminded him. “You always answer for me.”

When he pulled away, whenever he tried to pull away it made him want to fling himself right back. Each time Seungyoun attempted to stop, each time he took a step back there was a singing charge in the air that curled into his gut and tugged at his insides threatening murder if he didn’t relinquish himself to those awful little impulses. It was harder to not want to feel wanted, to not want to feel the numbing distraction of someone’s else guilt. He could drown himself in it, sucking in the shame and the anger and let it mingle with his own like the dull ache of no man’s land: a Babylon for sinners where their disgrace was trapped inside and swapped between tongues and hands and kisses of furious, vitriolic wickedness. Bearing the wounds of another instead of feeling his own was the only way he had learned how to make it day to day. 

“You make me feel ugly,” Seungyoun wafted out in between breathy moans. “You make me hate myself more than I-” he cut himself off trying to control the heady breathlessness in his chest. 

“More than I already do.” 

“Welcome to the club, baby.” 

Alluring tainted spirit: that was what Seungwoo breathed into the younger’s lungs. He didn’t give him life or love or trust, he gave him sin. In as fucking biblical as the words, Seungyoun was falling into a pit of desires that damned him the moment he began to consider indulging. Even the thought, just the thought, of giving in was impossible to ignore. 

He lay there listening to the words Seungwoo flung into his head: _“You’re useless. You’re addicted. You’re broken.”_ But there was something, one thing he didn’t say, that Seungyoun heard in the spaces in between. 

_“You need the hurt.”_

And he did. He really fucking needed it. 

\--- 

Seungwoo looked at him, asleep and waiting in between the throws of being known and being loved. He saw a broken sunset, all clean and fine and cracked. Seungyoun was shattered in the most delicate of ways, shivering at winds which blew from his own lips and crumbling at the faintest of touches. There was something so broken inside him and Seungwoo knew he made it worse. He had always known and he still let Seungyoun come back time and time again when he was the most broken. They both let it happen.


	7. Knocked up on dreams and red wine

A violent knocking woke Seungwoo up in the middle of the night. He groaned and rolled over, stuffing his face into the fluff of comforter beneath him, bare arms finding their way up to hold the pillow against his ears. He needn’t open his eyes to know the morning was not yet there to greet them and the judging moon still hung in the sky above him, silently damning him where he lay. He might deserve it too had he accepted he was wrong at all. But Hans were never wrong and Seungwoo was a prodigy. Until the day he died or the day he failed, Seungwoo was nothing but another body bearing the name and all the expectations which came with it. 

He distantly remembered that his roommate should be off on diplomatic leave, attending some event or another in a suit too shiny and liquored up beyond recognition. The knocking continued. Someone was adamantly pounding on his door at, he peeked open an eye to check his bedside clock, 2 am. He reluctantly righted himself in bed, the jackhammer of a fist on his door still playing in the background as he yawned and cracked his neck to each side, flexing his back before he got out of bed. He tensed his toes into the carpet in an effort to rouse them and padded lazily over to the door. He found Seungyoun there with glassy eyes, leaning against the doorframe for support. The younger’s shirt was a mess, barely sitting on his chest anymore with half the buttons popped off and the veins in his hands bulged heavy rivers on his skin where they had been beating the door in agitated impatience. 

“You’re drunk,” Seungwoo realized. 

And there was a part of Seungyoun that wanted to admit that, admit that he always thought of the other when he drank, every fucking time. To just tell him that he thinks of him, he does. But only ever when he doesn’t want to deal with himself, only ever when he didn’t want to think about life and Seungwoo became a fantasy of different choices he made. He thought of him when the moon bore down and he felt its weight like a vice on his neck and it reminded him, in some fucked up way, it reminded him of Seungwoo. But he’d never tell him that, because then when he feels it and when he needs it, Seungwoo might not answer. 

“You’re drunk,” the fourth year repeated. 

Seungyoun smiled back, lopsided and so blissfully happy at the awful decisions he was making. “Why else did you think I’d come here?” he asked. 

Seungwoo raised a hand to wipe the sleep from his eyes and process what exactly was happening. “Fair enough,” he answered. “But I’m not.” 

The younger stood there silent in the empty corridor, watching him with his calculating eyes. He was dissecting; His gaze drew Seungwoo apart, tearing at seams and slitting a knife through stitches meant to keep him at bay, specially him. Seungyoun stepped forward and placed a hand on the elder’s chest, a light pat until his fingers scrunched up and the second year’s nails dug into Seungwoo’s skin through his sleep shirt. 

“Are you going to send me away?” the younger pouted up at him. 

The younger's breath rumbled with tiny rumours a seeking naked, empty head to place its vicious whispers. Seungyoun was poison, dripped into his favorite drink, placed at his tongue, and then waiting to be swallowed. Who was Seungwoo to refuse it? 

Seungwoo sighed, forcing his eyes to focus on the wall beside Seungyoun and not the boy himself. “No,” he conceded, gaze flitting back. 

This drew another smile from Seungyoun and the younger was slinking inside the threshold, with a soft, “Good” as he shut the door behind him. 

Not even a second had passed, not even a whole step of Seungyoun’s foot upon the floor of Seungwoo’s dorm room, before he was clawing out for the other’s head, hands gripping tightly on either side as he heaved the other towards him. It wasn’t a beautiful thing. It was vicious and selfish. Seungyoun used him perhaps a little more than he always had in that moment, a barrier of decency, crumpled and war-torn decency, no longer there to keep him company. 

“You burn me.” Seungwoo exhaled into the other’s mouth, pausing his lips on the younger’s and setting the words free to fall into the mouth resting at his breath. 

Seungyoun surged forward and grabbed the words straight off his tongue, an aggressive need propelling him as he clung, desperately clung, to the other’s body and curled his tongue into Seungwoo’s mouth. “Then stop,” he mumbled back. 

Seungwoo tightened his arms around the smaller body and squeezed like a hurricane might come through in the next moment and rip the other from his hold. Although maybe it wasn’t that at all. Seungyoun’s spirited brain, drunk on a mélange of whiskeys and cognacs and wine, supplied him with a nagging whisper that Seungwoo didn’t care at all, that Seungwoo didn’t want him there, that Seungwoo… well, that the older boy would sooner gut him in in his sleep than relinquish any pride. 

Seungwoo drew away and extended his hand as on would defend against a rabid beast stalking its prey. It was a moment of open exposure where it wasn’t Seungwoo’s heart on his sleeve, but an unflattering show of regret where his hands came to rest on his face in what could only be understood to Seungyoun as shame and he shakily breathed out all the air from his lungs in hopes it might expel the fire in the pit of his chest, burning and burning for the younger to touch him once again. 

“I can’t,” he eventually admitted, meeting Seungyoun’s intensely attentive gaze. 

“Then shut up, Han,” Seungyoun stalked forward, lightly batting his hand aside, and cut him off with another kiss. The younger drew back for a moment almost laughing as Seungwoo chased after his lips. “Because I hate the sound of your voice.” 

It was like his mind was running away from his body, or maybe the other way around. There was no way to really grasp the heady mindspace he found himself in, letting himself be pulled under a haze of Seungwoo, everything was Seungwoo. It wasn’t rage or lust or anything but that single name on his tongue and it tasted so addicting he forgot his own body for a moment. Seungwoo gathered the younger boy in his arms, hoisting his thighs up and clinging to them before he threw the boy at his desk. Seungyoun’s head hit a shelf and his body knocked a stack of books over the side, clattering to the floor with a thud nowhere near as loud as his figure slamming into the piece of furniture. He didn’t have to think about it before Seungwoo was once again towering over him in a lumbering gravity that wrestled his soul out and crushed it in the fourth year’s hands. 

Seungyoun grabbed at the older boy and entrapped Seungwoo’s waist between his legs, squeezing like a cobra beyond the point of jest or fun but to reserve some sense of power, to bruise. His one hands shot out as Seungwoo reached forward and clawed the younger’s back, hitting a mug on the desk beside him. Seungwoo continued the lurid ministrations on the younger’s pulse point as Seungyoun grabbed the mug and flung it with a spasmed agitation across the room, smashing it into the wall with flying bits of glass. 

“Your body becomes violent,” Seungwoo breathed into the younger’s mouth as he roamed around his body, tracking the boy’s curves and drips and bones and skin. “You become consumed by it.” 

Seungwoo’s mouth tracked down the younger’s jawbone, sucking into the skin, hands gripping so tight on the boy’s legs that Seungyoun was sure the hands would remain imprinted into his flesh. 

“I think I’d rather go to hell than-” he was cut off by a hitch in his lungs and a deep guttural moan that sounded so nakedly animalistic to even his own ears, brain rewiring as Seungwoo just fucking touched him, touched him like he meant it in every violating sense of the words. “Than to listen to you speak a second more,” he got out eventually, eyes rolling into the back of his head. 

Seungwoo pulled away with a smirk as Seungyoun’s eyes glazed over and his hands desperately fisted at nothing, sliding across the empty wood surface. 

“Oh, honey,” the fourth year laughed. “We’re both already there.”

\--

As a kid, Seungyoun had felt special: so incredibly, damningly special. And it was all so incredibly, mind-numbing perfect. He hated being perfect. When he awoke that morning, he was reminded of whispers: whispers traced through the faintest of smiles between lips with a broken seal, their message lost upon warm breath. Whispers shared between two of opposing dreams and opposing wants. And the blanket was warm. The arm embraced about his waist was warm. The breathe at his neck tickling the edge of his hairline was warm. And it grew stifling as he lay awake, tucked into a tender hold of a person he loathed more than all his nightmares combined. It grew so impossibly stifling Seungyoun thought he might just die from it. Every fucking joint he had fucking ached from touching Seungwoo. His muscles tore themselves from the tendons as he lied there, staring at his hands on the bed sheets in disgust. But it was the pain which kept him rooted there, the pain which kept him from spiraling. 

And it made him sick… sick…. sick. 

Seungyoun never thought he’d know another’s handprints upon himself, littering his skin in velvet bruises like a branding. He never thought that they would stay a mar on the slope of his waist or the curve of his hip longer than he wanted them to. He never knew someone’s touch could be fucking seared into his skin, running so deep it hit his bone and nestled itself upon his naked ribcage. He felt it, he saw it, he hated it.

He tried to expel the older boy: to shove a knife into his stomach and grab the shards of Seungwoo there, to tear them from his organs and severe the ligaments binding him there, to reach a hand deep inside, grab the disgusting part of himself that loved the other being buried there and rip it from his bloody insides. But he couldn’t. No matter how much he wanted to, he could never do it. He was gone. He was too invested to let go. And so he laid there, drowning in the whispers until they drove him mad.


	8. I know nothing wrong could happen while i'm still in love with you

Seungyoun stood in the hall breathing in the still sanitized air of the infirmary. The moonlight came pouring through the windows nearly full, a waxing pool of silver light bathing the second year in a cold spotlight. He waited, just beyond the threshold, for so long he thought himself he might not dare to continue. But it had taken something to even get him that far in the first place and perhaps he still had a little, at least an ounce left, to push him into the confrontation he lamented more than anything else. Maybe, it was his own fault. No one ever told him to wear his heart on his sleeve and now that it was bruised, and battered, and mangled, maybe he was the one to blame for it. 

It’s time to face mistakes, he thought. He had never held anything back from Seungwoo and he wasn’t ever going to start. The older boy had never run away before, through every sin and every confession and every fucking shitty thing he ever did. Seungwoo hated him but he was still there, and, well, someone else wasn’t. A part of him knew the fourth year fed off his crippling impulses and instigated them, nudging them onward, but he also saw them. He saw every part of Seungyoun whether the younger wanted him to or not. And Seungyoun had done a lot of hiding. 

Seungwoo was alone, still and splayed out on the bed, sheets tugging around his waist where he turned to the side, the evident pull of the fabric caught under his other side stretched tenuously across the boy’s hip and tucked under the side of the mattress furthest from him. Some distant part of Seungyoun thought it looked like a mimic of a straight jacket. It was fitting, in an ironic way, considering why the older boy was there in the first place. Seungyoun stepped into the room and the very first footfall was louder than he imagined, than he had prepared himself for. Seungwoo flinched at the clack of the other’s shoe but didn’t turn to face the door. 

He stepped forward again, listened to the disturbed silence, and then again and again until he had no more steps to take. Seungyoun quieting settled himself down on the infirmary bed with a hesitant hand reached out to guide his body down oh so slowly. He still refused to make eye contact with the injured boy, eyes locked to the space where his feet met the floor, toes kissing the empty ground. Seungwoo wordlessly rolled onto his back and pushed his body upright to recline into the pillows. 

“Please don’t hurt yourself,” Seungyoun mumbled into the darkness resting between them like a barricade, like a mask, so thick that it allowed him to dare say the words at all. 

It was quiet again for a moment, the flicker of an old light in the hall clicking on and off and on and off incessantly. It felt like the ticks of a clock to the younger boy, egging him into a frantic need to speak things he wasn’t ready to. 

“You’re not supposed to care,” Seungwoo’s voice drifted back. 

Seungyoun bristled at that, a tense defense making its way into his body and he gulped down the discomfort of the words. “I don’t,” he said. 

“You’d feel guilty, then?” Seungwoo almost laughed in question and then groaned, reaching a hand down to his lower stomach, no doubt bandaged beneath the gown he wore. “Everyone would think you did it,” the elder added. 

“No. I just-“ Seungyoun caught himself, hands going down to rest on his slack covered thigh in support of a body struggling too much to breathe. He rubbed them up and down his legs for a moment before answering. “You’re a bit of a time bomb.” 

And Seungwoo’s airy scoff, one he fucking swore would be imprinted on his goddamn brain until the very second his soul decided to give in, sounded in the dark. “Tell me something I don’t know.” 

“I’m serious,” Seungyoun insisted, finally letting himself look at the other and realizing Seungwoo had been looking at him the entire time. “Are you alright?” he asked. 

Seungwoo’s lips thinned into a tight disappointment and he stared the second year down. “You don’t really want the answer to that question.”  
“I asked it.” 

“Yeah,” Seungwoo laughed. “Thanks for that.” He shifted his body up into the pillows more, gingerly maneuvering his body further into a seated position. “At least you had the balls to do that much.” 

“I asked,” Seungyoun repeated, wanting… well, he didn’t know. 

Maybe he wanted the validation that he asked, the moral high ground that he was trying to care, a vague semblance of comradery with a boy he couldn’t wedge out of his mind even if he pried with a freshly sharpened chef’s knife at the frayed and crumbling edges of his sanity where Seungwoo sat nestles with taunt pins sticking into his vulnerable fleshy conscious. He would bleed, Seungyoun thought, if he ever tried to rid himself of the other. He would bleed and he would hurt. 

“Yeah,” Seungwoo answered him. “You sure did.” 

The younger let out a groan and folded his body over, elbows propped on knees, and forward dropping into clasped fingers before him. “Can’t you at least pretend you care? That you care about anything.”

“I do,” Seungwoo responded without hesitation. “I care about image.” 

“Then why do you destroy yourself?” Seungyoun scoffed. “Why do you run yourself into the ground with a life of liquor, and loathing, and lies?” 

“Because I’ll be damned if I die by anyone’s hand but my own.” 

“God,” the younger spat out. “You’re so conceited.” 

“You are too, hotshot,” Seungwoo threw back accusingly. “Just as much as I am. Why else would you be here, visiting me, your favorite itch to scratch, in the middle of the night when no one can see you?” 

“I…”

“You only ever visit me in the night,” Seungwoo said coldly. “I bet you barely even know what colour my eyes are.” 

“There’s a scar of your chin,” Seungyoun said slowly. “Right under the lip of the bone, slopping down towards your neck. It’s pale and almost unnoticeable but if you feel it, if you run your hand along the skin there, you can tell.” 

“Youn-”

“And there’s a jagged little shape I can’t name on your brow,” the junior continued, “Right on the end. It’s slightly blistered and it gets rougher in the winter when it dries.”  
Seungwoo stared at him. 

“You try to hide it with a sweep of your hair during the day, but it pokes out when you’re not paying attention,” the second year added, pushing up from the bed. “And when you sleep all the contempt you stare at me with is gone and your face relaxes enough for me to really see it fully.” 

Seungyoun stood there, gaze falling to the small window above Seungwoo’s bed and then slitting back down to the body in the bed. Neither of them wanting to address what exactly the words meant. 

“And your eyes are brown,” he finished, stepping away into the room. 

“Where are you going?” the elder asked. 

“Nowhere,” he mumbled, body slowly disappearing into the dark shadows of the infirmary. 

The second year paused, on the line of the light, fading out but the outline of his cheekbone still there, the plush of his lip still visible. He stared straight into Seungwoo’s soul. 

“You make me feel heartbreak when I’ve never been in love,” he added and then he was gone.

Seungwoo watched him walk away and an intense longing, a visceral need to follow the shuffling steps of the younger boy into the dark overtook him. without knowing he had managed to rise from the bed and padded after the boy, the faint light of the pharmacy room peeking out from a cracked door and a broken boy clutching at the counter. 

“You never listen to me,” Seungyoun muttered brokenly when his eyes meet the tips of Seungwoo’s shoes resting in the doorway. 

“Every time you speak to me, its things I’m always terrified to hear because,” the elder paused. “Well, because they’re true.” 

“You need to hear them.”

“You need to say them,” Seungwoo offered back. 

Seungyoun released a shaky breath which chopped out of his lungs and past his lips like air sliced through and through by helicopter blades, strong and true, heavy and harsh. “Did I?,” he asked the other. 

“Yes,” Seungwoo said. “Trust me. I know you.” 

“No!” Seungyoun’s voice rose and the veins in his neck strung themselves so tight, Seungwoo could visibly see the agitated frustration on the other’s body. “I hate you,” he screamed, pushing Seungwoo against the wall and rattling the bottle lined shelves, a couple fell down and smashed upon the floor in a frenzy of glass. “And I hate that you fucking thrive in the ugliest parts of me because it means you know me and you’re the only fucking person who does and I hate it!” 

Seungwoo was silent for a while after Seungyoun finished, soaking in the words as they hung there in the tiny room and soaking in the seeping liquids that spilled from shelves on high, the barrage of raining glass having fallen upon their heads and now resting there, in tiny little shards. Seungwoo cleared his throat and a couple fragments of glass loosened themselves from his hair and toppled down, chinking down on the floor. He watched Seungyoun’s chest heave up and down with exerted breathes. 

“You took all the words I was meant to say to myself,” Seungwoo said. 

Seungyoun’s face fell and his hand slackened. He dropped it to his side and let his body crumple onto the ground, an extended hand barely catching his body as it tumbled to the floor. “Can you leave?” he asked. 

It was desperate. Not the sort of desperation, fueled by hate and rage, that Seungwoo had grown accustomed to gracing the other’s lips, but a sad one. There were many types of desperation, Seungwoo had learned, and he associated each and every one of them with Seungyoun. There was a boiling one he knew all too well that usually ended up with busted lips and teeth sinking into his shoulder. There was a strangely shattered one that only came out in dark corners and when the younger drowned himself in liquor. There was a chilled, frigid one so fragile it barely got the words out and there was a gentler desperation that somehow, someway, had found itself into their bubble only once before. But, this wasn’t any of those things. It simply wasn’t. It was… it was deep and longing and paralyzingly emotional. It felt like an ocean of regret and fear and nostalgic sorrow. It felt like Seungyoun was struggling above waves of repentance trying to speak a confession and plead for mercy, but the water kept chocking them right back down his throat. 

“Why are you still here?” Seungyoun’s broken voice sounded from the space where his chin met his chest and his bowed head concealed the hefty emotional weight which preyed upon him. 

“I don’t know,” he admitted. 

“Why,” the boy stressed, “are you still here?!” he asked again, louder, harder, still not meeting Seungwoo’s eye. 

The older boy shifted his weight, wringing his hands before him in a twirling tumble of thumbs and palms and clammy skin meeting clammy skin, over and over. Seungyoun glanced up in the silence with a desperation Seungwoo knew from panted heaves of breathe filling small spaces between the two of them, from whiny high pitches the younger refused to admit he made, and from when he first the second year. The very first day he ever saw Cho Seungyoun and the very first day the younger started hating him. His eyes, oh his eyes, they weren’t the same he had come to know, desperate for release and battle, for thoughtless trivial things and for aggressive admissions. Seungwoo had come to realize that Seungyoun liked to fight. He needed it. 

“Because you’re beautiful,” he eventually offered up as an excuse to the other, and maybe he, himself, was just as desperate as the other. 

“No,” the strangled detestation fell from Seungyoun’s lips. “You know what?” he spoke out and it sounded like a starved man confronted with a rotting feast set before him. “I’m over being called beautiful! Call me a fucking wreck,” he all but pleaded, a viscous dirty acidic plea. “Call me fuckup and a liar and a cheat,” he demanded. “And then tell me, at the end of all that, that you still love me because, the truth is, I don’t have to be beautiful for you to love me.”

“I love you,” Seungwoo said softly, staring straight into the wild, crying eyes of the younger boy. “I love you and I hate myself for it.” 

Seungyoun didn’t answer at first, soft sobs wracking his body, his heart pumping through his ribcage like a battering ram thrown weakly, flung about without conviction. When the second year lifted his hand from the floor to cradle his face, Seungwoo noticed the nicks and trails of blood from the glass covered floor and almost took a step forward.

“You don’t even know what love is.” 

"…"

“You can pretend you do,” he choked out. “And you can make me feel responsible for letting you in but you don’t love me. Don’t lie, Seungwoo. Don’t lie anymore.” 

Stop lying. How many times had Seungwoo been told to stop lying when he stumbled through hot bodies bleary eyes and let his mind fall into an oblivion of regret and pleasure and nothing? He gave everything he had inside him, and more, and more, and more until he had stolen from everyone around him and blindly handed it over to baggies and bottled and any little thing that would let him forget how much he felt, how deeply he felt. He was done with feeling. 

“You don’t love me because there’s something you love more,” Seungyoun said. 

When the second year met his eyes Seungwoo looked so small: a child lost and wayward in the world, seeking guidance and answers that were never handed to him. That’s what Seungwoo was, Seungyoun realized. He was abandoned and he was scared. 

“I don’t want to…” the elder whispered, more the shapes of his lips mouthing the words than even really speaking them at all. 

Seungyoun lost all the anger in his body, slumping down exhausted muscles and resigning to it. “I know,” he whispered back. “But it doesn’t change the fact that you make me a terrible person,” the second year confessed. 

He had known, he had known for as long as could possibly have and still it stung to say aloud, to get rid of playing pretend and be dragged along the floor back into a reality he no longer cared to inhabit, because, well, he ruined it. 

“You make me a terrible, horrible shell of a person,” Seungyoun repeated, “and I think you were worse than being alone.” 

“What do you want me to do?” 

“I want you to leave.” 

“Okay,” he said, turning to the door. “I’m sorry,” Seungwoo added automatically and then paused rigid, because, for the first time, he knew he meant it.


	9. Lord, I've been a mess, nevertheless, love you to death

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm not really sure if this is the end but i also dont think they deserve closure so....

_Don’t go to him. Don’t go to him. Don’t go to him._

And the saddest part was that when he got there Seungwoo had been waiting. Seungyoun stumbled in in raw and naked and flayed begging to be put back into the skin he stripped from his body as it burned. He felt too deeply and too much. Seungwoo was there, just standing there, just fucking breathing and there was never anything that Seungyoun resented more than the other watching him fall apart while he stood there doing nothing. 

“Make me stop thinking,” he pleaded, throwing himself at the elder. “Make me stop thinking and feeling and thinking and thinking,” he babbled. 

There was crushing weight of emotion that barreled over him and pummeled him to the ground, kicking into him as he laid there defenseless against it all. _Chungha, Chungha, Chungha, Chungha._ Gone. She was gone and his chest tore itself apart, ripping at his bones like they were thorns in a rose garden and discarding them into the dying yellowed grassed of autumn. 

He shed the jacket from his body, and tore the tie from his neck, pulling and pulling against his exhausted muscles until the thing snapped loose, unfurling the knot. He grabbed at Seungwoo and clawed at the buttons on the boy’s chest, Seungwoo’s hands coming up to grab his manic wrists and wrestle the younger boy away. 

"I’m not going to sleep with you, Youn,” Seungwoo told him. “Not now.” 

Seungyoun ignored him and ripped the shirt open, uncontrollably undressing the other boy who tried to push them lips from his neck and the hands from his chest and the boy from his mind. 

“God, stop,” he insisted, roughly shoving Seungyoun back but the younger held on and bit into the flesh of Seungwoo’s neck, fingers latching onto the skin of his back and raking down in streams of pinching fire. 

“Youn, come on,” Seungwoo begged. “No!” he yelled, tearing the other’s head from his collarbone in an abrupt jerk that had Seungyoun pausing for a second before he suddenly dropped to his knees before the other, hands digging into the fourth year’s hips. 

The second year mindlessly clawed at the other’s zipper, fumbling about his waist. It was terrifying to see him that lost. Seungwoo had never wanted him to be that lost. 

“Seungyoun!” Seungwoo yelled, hand having reached down fist the younger’s hair in order to get his attention, in order to physically pull him out of hysteria. 

The boy looked up at his broken, eyes brimming with tears and a shattered heart visible in his stare, the torn pieces floating about his pupils. The light hit Seungyoun in such a way that one eye bathed in the sun kissed rays from the window, deep and warm, and the other was cast into darkness across the streak of a shadow from the wall upon his face. One eye sat there, unloved and unknown to the other, walling next to the brilliance of the one shining next to it. But, that was Seungyoun, Seungwoo thought. He held his breath, finally seeing the other’s face, knelt before him broken and battered and utterly lost, but there. The angle alone was enough to cast sinful reminiscence on the moment and Seungwoo realized exactly the hand he had in enabling the younger boy. He loved him and he always knew Seungyoun never would. 

Seungyoun finally slumped forward and rested his forehead exhaustedly against Seungwoo’s hip, the older boy’s hand still clutched into his hair. Seungyoun’s hands slipped around Seungwoo’s waist, hooking at the back, hand over wrist, and he cried. Seungwoo stood there, running his hands through the other’s hair, petting submission into him and quieting his hysteric mind. 

“We can’t… We shouldn’t be doing this,” Seungwoo realized. “We shouldn’t have in the first place and now… I don’t know who broke first but we’ve ended up in pieces together.” 

“No, please,” the younger begged, his voice breaking as he continued to spill molten tears down his cheeks. “I need you. Seungwoo, please. I-” 

“No. No, you don’t,” Seungwoo breathed out harshly. “You never needed me, not really,” he rambled. “Not as much as I…” he stopped to shake his head. “You don’t need me, baby.” 

“I love you,” the boy pleaded. 

“You’re lying,” he threw back instantly he heard the words. “I don’t want a single thing you have to give me.” 

_‘And yet I’ll take it all. I’ll clutch it to my chest and I’ll hoard it like a starved lover at their wits ends looking to be driven insane by the sincerity if loving someone so completely so.’_

He said none of these things and yet all of them as well. He admitted them to himself which was, perhaps, harder than anything else. They came to him, quite alike a dream he dreamed, and rolled round his head until he had to let them out: scream them, cry them, whisper them, carve them into the wood of a tree no one ever thought to look twice at. He put them into the air, silent and penitent, and let them hand there without a hook or a rope or a hope someone might catch them before they fell. No, no one should ever find them there, in between the breathes. They were safe to hang and dry: dry beyond recognition, having expelled the saturation of living. 

“Take it all back,” he said… because he couldn’t handle any more. 

Seungyoun’s grip tightened around Seungwoo’s middle until his arms fell slack to the sides. Seungwoo thought for a moment he had finally calmed before Seungyoun swung his arm around the back of the older boy’s knees and forced him to the ground too. Seungwoo’s kneecaps cracked harshly on the floor sending rockets of pain up his legs. Seungyoun deliriously tackled the boy backwards, still on his knees, arm cradling up the back of Seungwoo’s head and grip tugging on his hair. He hung the fourth year above the ground, Seungwoo’s legs having flung out between Seungyoun’s thighs, trapped under the other’s form. 

“You have no fucking right to turn me away when I ask you for anything!” Seungyoun spat in his face. “You have no RIGHT to pretend you’re better than this!” 

“I can’t do that to you,” Seungwoo said and the calmness which he still managed to cling to drove Seungyoun fucking insane. “Just because you didn’t fall apart as visibly as the rest of us doesnt mean you didn’t fall apart.” 

“Fucking FUCK me!” the boy screamed. “Make me forget!” he demanded, slamming Seungwoo’s head into the ground with a jolt of his wrist and bringing it back up again. 

Seungwoo finally reared his head up, manically twisting it out of Seungyoun’s grasp and winding his hands up to shove the younger back, causing him to fall flat on his back and the air to expel from his lungs. Seungyoun laid there and shuddered, hooded eyes dragging down the length of his body and locking onto Seungwoo’s. 

“I’m begging you to use me so I don’t have to feel anything,” he said. 

Seungwoo shook his head at the younger’s words and sat down, letting his body fall back defeated. “I can’t do that.” 

Seungyoun slumped into the floor, stating at the ceiling. “Then what the fuck have you been doing this entire time?” 

“I loved you,” Seungwoo answered, watching the other’s ragged breathes. “I loved you because you were the only thing in my life that wasn’t broken and then I thought you’d leave me if you weren’t...”

Seungyoun propped himself up on his elbow and made eye contact. 

“…so I broke you too,” Seungwoo finished, running hands down his face, pushing into the skin and into the bone like he wanted to tear the skin off. 

He didn’t hear the younger move, feel the disturbance in the air until Seungyoun was right in front of him, crawling into his space like he wanted to die there. 

“You don’t even want to be loved,” Seungwoo whispered, letting his hand fall on the other’s rising and falling chest that came slowly, so slowly, closer to him. “You just violently need someone to fall apart for you and I was stupid enough to do it.” 

“If you broke me,” Seungyoun spoke, placing his lips atop the other’s mouth and sending the words straight into the other’s head, “then why aren’t you taking any responsibility for it?”

“Because I’m trying to be a good person for once,” Seungwoo murmured, feeling the brush of the younger’s lips against his and shuddering at the soft intimacy. 

Seungyoun grabbed the older boy’s jaw and held him there, crawling forward again until Seungwoo had nowhere to run, trapped between the second year’s thighs and claws and vicious gaze. “I don’t want you to be a good person.” 

Fucking hell. How had this happened? How had they gotten here? Seungwoo’s heart thumped in his chest like the beat of a drum on its way to war, ready to fight and ready to die. In that moment Seungwoo thought he wouldn’t mind drowning if Seungyoun was the one to do it. 

“Fine,” Seungyoun grit out, teeth grabbing his lower lip and pulling it away before it sprung out from the bite with a rough pinch and settled back down. “I’ll go to Niel then.” 

Seungwoo froze, a cold wash dousing him in seconds. “How do you know about Niel?” he demanded. 

“Sejeong introduced me.” 

“He’s not… Youn, no. Don’t go to him.” 

The second year’s body slowly rose from Seungwoo, leaving him cold and empty on the floor. Those moments, the one where emotion incapacitated and muscles didn’t listen, limbs succumbed to a uselessly frozen mind and the world immobilized itself in the most terrible way possible. Seungyoun was on his feet before Seungwoo could even really think to stop him, to process what it really meant. 

“Seungyoun, do NOT go to him!” Seungwoo scrambled up, more terrified than he had ever been in his life. It felt worse than every single one of those 207 seconds combined, worse than the cliffs, worse than Niel, worse than anything. “Seungyoun?!” he reached out. “Please don’t go to him!” 

Seungyoun kept walking and walking and walking and something inside him snapped, watching what he, for a split second, saw as his younger self entering the dark cave he was lost in and wanting so desperately to bar the entrance. He grabbed Seungyoun and slammed into the wall, the room rocking at the movement and a picture jumping off the wall and crashing to the floor beside them. He huffed out one, two breathes before he calmed, and placed the gentlest touch he had never given Seungyoun on the other’s face. He caressed down the side of his cheek and cupped his cheek into his palm. 

“I could kiss you a thousand times or caress your sleeping face but my hands are not of god’s design and I have such little faith in them.” 

Seungyoun batted the hand away with something in between unadulterated betrayal and pure rage, or maybe both. “That’s not what I want,” Seungyoun spoke lowly through clenched teeth, frustrated and shaking. 

“He’ll make your bad decisions for you,” Seungwoo said softly. “You won’t have a choice.” 

Seungyoun held the other eyes as if he had cast a lure and slunk the metal hook through Seungwoo’s pupils. “But you were my bad decision.” 

The fourth year deflated at that, hands delicately placed on Seungyoun’s shoulders, pressing down. “What am I supposed to do?” Seungwoo mumbled, dropping his forehead against the younger’s. 

Seungyoun turned his neck and let Seungwoo fall forward against him, hating the feeling of the other’s skin against his, hating the breath and the heartbeat and the hands and the eyes. 

“Let me go,” Seungyoun grit out, biting at the air. “I know in your own fucked-up, sick way you care about me but that’s not what I need right now.” 

“Will you tell me you’re going to be okay?” Seungwoo pleaded as Seungyoun slipped out from the boy’s arm and starting toward the door again. 

The faintest brush of his body as he escaped Seungwoo’s hold blistered the fourth year’s skin, lingering and melting the flesh until the air revolted him and he felt the nauseous ringing of disgust so deep inside of him it consumed his head. 

“I thought you didn’t want me to lie to you anymore.” 

It was worse, so much worse, than the day his life ended, the day he decided to give up. It hurt more than the nightmares he couldn’t shake and the thoughts he couldn’t kill. Seungwoo thought he wouldn’t have minded drowning if it were for Seungyoun, but he was wrong. Because now Seungyoun was ready to drown himself too. 

And it was all Seungwoo's fault.


	10. I know it feels good

Seungyoun stormed from the rejection of the fourth year and propelled through the halls, mind blank just dripping in anger. The buildings flew by his eyes in a flurry of stone and ice and nothing more than unplaceable shapes that swirled around his aching head. His chest was an open wound, ribs cracked open with a set of industrial pliers and letting the air just hit his unprotected heart. It wasn’t the same blind compulsion that he usually let drive him to Seungwoo’s door in the middle of too much thinking. He had thought… well he had paused at the end of the corridor, right when the door finally closed in the empty space behind him. The faintest noise met his ear and then the silence made him stop. He waited for that brief pause afterwards for Seungwoo to come after him, but he never did. 

And the second he got there, the very instant he arrived, he knew he didn’t want to be there. He fucking knew he would regret it and yet he let himself open the door anyways, let Seungwoo’s words grace the very deepest parts of his mind in reminder and then tucked them into the folds of his sanity with a nail running through to keep them shut tightly. It was always somehow fantastically disillusioned in the hanger where Niel chose to make his headquarters. No one ever needed to ask where the fourth year engineering student was. Like a specter he haunted the darkened concrete square with huffs and puffs and billowing smoke passed between mouths, falling like saliva from one lip to another. And Seungyoun knew, he knew the type of people they were and what they did and what was said about them. He wouldn’t be so cliché as to call them wolves because they had pelts upon their walls which were permeated, no doubt, by the pervasive stink of ether, and acetone, and vinegar. 

“Oh,” Niel faltered as Seungyoun stepped into the room, straightening himself from his reclining position on the tufted sofa. “I didn’t think you’d come back.”

Seungyoun stepped forward silent, looking between the others there. Niel nodded to the two boys and they picked themselves up from the seats with lopsided smiles, shuffling away. One of them patted Seungyoun’s shoulder as he passed and the younger jolted at the touch, wanting nothing more than to shrink from the touch but he couldn’t, not here, not in front of… 

Niel smiled and patted the open sofa next to him. “Come sit, kid. I don’t bite.”

“I need something,” he said after a moment, lowering himself, inch by inch to the rough brown leather. 

Niel leaned back and placed an arm around the back of the sofa, slinging it behind Seungyoun’s back in a casually possessive gesture. He chuckled wryly and dryly in his throat before eyeing the second year in his periphery as he leaned toward the coffee table littered in streaks of motor oil and tiny rusted Bunsen burners and mismatched silver spoons. The older boy grabbed a small bag from the table, the lip of it between his middle and ring finger, and then retreated back into the cushions along side Seungyoun, a little closer than before. Niel exhaled a long breath, dropping his head back onto the seat and closing his eyes. 

“Can I tell you I’m sorry? Are you tried of hearing that yet?” 

He didn’t say anything. Because what was he supposed to say. That sorry didn’t change anything, that it meant nothing, that he was so viscerally tired of hearing it even after the very first time. The fourth year reached over and patted Seungyoun’s thigh once, twice, and then left the burning weight of his hand there on the other’s leg. 

“You’re a good boy, aren’t you?” he murmured, eyes still closed. “You’re so good,” he added, the words tumbling out in afterthought, almost like he hadn’t meant to speak them. “So fucking good.” 

A few seconds later, the beating hammer of his heartbeat counting them off as they  
passed, Niel roused again and turned toward the second year. 

“Listen,” he sighed. “I don’t know if you should be here. I mean it’s not my right to say but I have feeling someone’s going to be very mad at me.”

“I want to be here,” the younger insisted. “I need something to-” he tried to articulate. “I need something.” 

“Seungyoun…”

“Please,” he pleaded, dropping his head down onto Niel’s shoulder. “Please let me,” he repeated, a sincere conviction behind his eyes. 

Niel looked like he was battling the thought for a second before he gave into it and grabbed the bag from his lap, ripping it open with his teeth and pouring out some powder into his palm which he then dumped upon the glass table. He readjusted his body on to the sofa, pulling a credit card from his back pocket and taking back both arms from Seungyoun’s figure to lean forward with his elbows on his knees. He winked at Seungyoun and began to slot the card into the fine white power, drawing away long thin slices of the substance. 

“How do I?”

“Oh, don’t worry, kid,” Niel laughed. “I got you.” 

The fourth year’s hand reached over to hook the pads of his fingertips under Seungyoun’s chin and draw the younger closer to him. Seungyoun’s breath caught in the gesture and let himself just be pulled, mindlessly, towards the older boy and the slim slivers on the glass which excited parts of him just as he looked at them. 

“Want me to help?” Niel whispered into Seungyoun’s ear, a slight lap of his tongue on the end of the question. 

“I-”

“Niel, what the fuck?!” a voice called out, halting them. 

Seungyoun wouldn’t have even needed to look up to know how it was: the voice, the tone, the fucking sound of the echoing footsteps so engrained into him, he couldn’t help but recognize it immediately. 

“I thought you didn’t like me anymore,” Niel pouted at Seungwoo. 

“What are you doing with him?” he asked, gaze latched onto fingers Niel still had placed on Seungyoun’s chin and the hand he had since inserted on the inside of the boy’s knee closest to him. 

Niel gently drew his hand back and down again, rubbing into the younger’s boys leg as he stared straight at Seungwoo. “Dude, relax,” he coaxed. “He could use some.”

“What are you doing here?” Seungyoun asked the, pushing Niel’s hand away from his neck in a hapless bat, distracted, focused. 

“I followed you because I was worried you weren’t lying.” 

Niel’s hand continued to pass back and forth in a comforting sweep over Seungyoun’s thigh and it was beginning to lull him, draw him into a secure ease even as Seungwoo practically shook before them in a maddened state. 

“Woo,” Niel caught the other’s attention. “Won’t you leave Seungyoun and I alone so we can chat?”

“Chat?!” the other blurted. “Niel you can’t seriously do this to him! He’s in grief goddammit!” 

“Good lord, I knew he’d be mad,” Niel breathed out under his breath. “I think I forgot the part where you were in charge of him for some reason?” the boy mocked. “Did I miss that?” he threw out, slinking back onto the sofa and letting his hands fall further down the open space between Seungyoun’s spread knees. 

Seungwoo stalked forward and grabbed Seungyoun’s wrist. “Come on. We’re going.” 

“No!” Seungyoun wrenched his hand back. 

For a second Seungwoo looked like he had been hit by a train, wide eyes just brimming with betrayal. “What do you mean no?” he grit out. 

“Why can’t he make my own decisions?” Niel asked the other fourth year. 

“You have no fucking say in this you piece of shit!” Seungwoo growled. 

“Woah,” Niel scoffed in offence and got on his feet to meet Seungwoo at eye level, his body making a notable absence from Seungyoun’s personal space. “What did I do?” 

“You cant keep doing this?” 

“Doing what?” Niel asked with a quirk of his brow, knowing full well what the other meant. 

Seungwoo’s hand immediately reeled back and slammed into Niel’s face. Seungyoun scrambled up as Niel cried out and slumped over, rushing to the engineer’s side. He looked back at Seungwoo with in alarm but Niel was already surging forward and swinging his arm in a left hook to collide with Seungwoo’s cheekbone. 

“What are you doing?” Seungyoun screamed but neither of the fourth years listened, throttling each other with flying fists and grunted breaths. 

Seungwoo dragged Niel up the few inches to meet his eyeline and then slammed the other boy down onto the glass table. Niel yelled out and kicked his foot directly into Seungwoo’s kneecap, causing the other to fall forward on top of him and slam into the table. The glass cracked immediately as the second boy made contact and then were falling through the shatters onto the concrete floor with an echoing shatter. 

“WHAT THE HELL?!” Seungyoun yelled at them, jumping back from the glass as they wrestled through it, little nicks and scrapes of red smattered across their bare skin, faces and arms and hands covered in the cuts. 

“YOU CANT FUCKING DO THIS!” Seungwoo bit at Niel, his body positioned behind the other, placing him into a choke hold. 

Niel slapped his hands against Seungwoo’s arm which sat across his neck and then rammed his fist into Seungwoo’s face making the other yelp and loosen his hold which Niel rolled out of. They stared at each other across the broken glass, breathed ragged and doused in pure aggression. Seungyoun just stared at them, this weird energy circling around them that made me feel like he was intruding on a deeply personal moment. 

“IT’S NOT MY FAULT!” Niel threw at him. “AND YOU’VE ALWAYS BLAMED ME BUT IT’S YOUR OWN FUCKING FAULT!” 

“BECAUSE IT WAS!” 

“Okay this needs to stop,” Seungyoun interrupted. “I don’t give a shit what you two have going on but I don’t want to-”

Seungwoo released the most guttural sound a man could make and launched himself at Neil, tackling the other onto the concrete again. Niel elbowed him in the neck. Seungwoo choked out a gasp as his windpipe recovered and he kneed Niel’s stomach so hard the air was expelled from the boy’s lungs. 

“God fucking dam-” someone’s shoulder hit Seungyoun’s leg and then a leg rolled into his other foot as he tried to catch his balance and the boy was stumbling back, reaching out to a metal shelf along the wall that came crashing down with him as the other two fought. 

Seungyoun’s head rammed into the edge of the shelf and it sank into his forehead with a cold bite that had him seeing stars as he fell to the floor. 

“Seungyoun!” a voice called out, too hazy for him to make out through his mangled head, the sting and the swimming pain cutting his brain off. 

He couldn’t tell what was happening in the next moments until he was blinking away spots in his eyes as Seungwoo lightly patted his cheek awake. 

“I don’t need you to save me,” Seungyoun whispered into the other’s face as he came to. “I’ve never needed anyone to save me.” 

Niel crawled forward, hissing and wincing at the glass cutting into his hands and knees and pushed Seungwoo away. “Look what you did!” he shot at the government student. “You fucker!” 

Seungyoun groaned and let his eyes fall shut again. 

“Hey, kid,” Niel spoke softly. “Want me to get rid of him?” 

Seungyoun’s lips moved ever so slightly, an inaudible confession on his tongue as his eyelids fluttered. 

“What was that?” Niel asked, leaning in. 

“No,” the second year mumbled. in a small voice. “I want it to stop,” he said.

Seungyoun felt a hand on his temple, gently caressing the gnash on his temple and looked up to see Seungwoo staring brokenly at the wound. “I know, baby. I know.”  
He let himself go limp into the floor, feeling Seungwoo’s arms tuck under his head and knees, and his body slowly rise from the floor. He heard a rustling and the faint clatter of clinking shards as the two fourth year’s stood. 

“What the fuck are you doing, Youn?” Seungwoo asked quietly. 

“I don’t want to talk about it,” the younger boy bit back, slumping into the elder’s chest, his body jostling at each long stride Seungwoo took. 

“Why?!” Seungwoo pleaded. “Why are you so desperately trying to tear yourself apart?” 

“Because she’s gone,” Seungyoun hummed. 

Seungwoo sighed, and readjusted the younger boy in his arms, shouldering open a door somewhere to something. “This started long before then, Youn.” 

Seungyoun finally muscled his eyes open, head nestled against the elder’s warm beating chest and looked up to Seungwoo for the first time without any of the barriers he had put up. 

“… do I have to have a reason?”

“You have a choice,” Seungwoo told him. “You have a choice that I didn’t have and it fucking wrecks me that you’re doing it anyways.” 

"What do you know about life?"


End file.
